Challenge!

Hello, and welcome to Blogs for Bush Rebutted! We hope you'll enjoy your stay.

My nom de blog is Diogenes, and I got together with some other folks I know at the Liberal Coalition to start this here blog.

Our raison d'etre (that makes two French phrases in as many paragraphs: Republicans we ain't) is to respond to the nuts at Blogs for Bush, and present facts to counter their rhetoric.

We will, on occasion, fight them on their home court, but that's proven to be problematic. You see, one day, not too long ago, I chose to respond to this post over at B4B, written by a guy named Mark Noonan. Basically, it contains a lot of wishful thinking about what a glorious success our glorious leader will be able to celebrate someday very, very soon, even though Iraq is falling into the hands of armed militias, we don't have enough troops over there, and the folks in charge (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz) haven't got a clue.

The post concludes with: 'I intend to remind [Democrats] at every turn that they were opposed to the liberation of people and the establishement [sic] of liberty and justice.'

So I raised a challenge to Mr. Mark Noonan in the comments. I said something like:

On October 1, if there are no significant attacks by insurgents, if the prime minister has effective control of the entire country, and if he enjoys the support of the majority of Iraqis, then I will write a letter congratulating George Bush which you can post on your blog. However, if the prime minister is effectively the 'mayor of Baghdad' a la Hamid Karzai, or has already been ousted, then you must write a letter acknowledging that you were wrong which I can post on my site.

Actually, this was probably a bet where neither of us would have had to pay. The current situation in Iraq is neither as sunny as Mark wants to believe nor as gloomy as 'mayor of Baghdad', and it's not likely to get to either extreme by October 1. Still, I wanted to see whether Mark was ready to back up his words by putting even a little bit of personal pride on the line.

When I went back to see whether Mark had taken up my offer, the offer had been deleted and replaced with the line: 'Deleted - Trolling'.

I fired back: Why was this deleted as trolling? And our compassionate conservative host replied: 'Lots of things qualify as trolling. Be careful.'

Take from this story what you will. For my part, I learned two lessons from this exchange. First, in order to effectively counter their right-wing nonsense, we need control of the forum. If Mark had behaved like a more reasonable person, we might not have created Blogs for Bush Rebutted. So all of you who wish we didn't exist can thank Mark that we're here. Second, as liberals, we actually believe in the free exchange of ideas. That is why no comment will ever be deleted at this site, no matter how much we may disagree with the author, as long as it's clear the author is sincerely attempting to engage in a discussion of the issues. The only comments we will ever delete are those which are profane, abusive, clearly irrelevant, or all three.

So give us you best shot. We'll certainly be giving B4B our best shots. We're not afraid of those on the other side because unlike Mark Noonan (apparently), we are confident that when both sides present their best arguments, we win.